The Scoop on PromotionsProject Support Team Blog

April 26th, 2010

Social Media and the 2010 Winter Olympics

Social media sites such as Twitter and Facebook transformed the way people viewed the 2010 Olympic Games.  Social media presented opportunities for interested viewers to follow events and athletes’ results as well as locate Vancouver 2010 Cultural Olympiad events and details. Rather than navigating the cumbersome official Olympic website, some people used social media to get directions to Olympic venues and others tweeted about the Games from their living room couches.

Long before the first athlete stepped into the Olympic stadium, Olympic organizers had begun daily tweets on the Torch following its progress through British Columbia.

Alexandra Samuel of the Harvard Business Review recently commented that “the Olympic narrative of global community seems like a natural fit for social media: just as Olympic Villages have been the birthplace for international friendships among athletes, the online conversation about the Games can now give rise to new friendships among Olympic viewers.”